Catching Courses / Chapter 1 - Catcher Set Up

by John Tamargo

John is a former Major League Baseball catcher who played all or part of five seasons in the major leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals (1976-1978), San Francisco Giants (1978-1979), and the Montreal Expos (1979-1980). Prior to being selected by the St. Louis Cardinals in the 6th round in the 1973 Major League Draft, he attended Georgia Southern University. He made his major league debut on September 3, 1976.
Following his playing career, John has had a long career managing and coaching for various organizations in the minors and the major leagues. In 1982, he was a minor league manager with the independent Miami Marlins. He joined the New York Mets organization from 1983-1996 and held various positions with the organizations. He managed the 1994 Double A Binghamton Mets to the Eastern League championships. In 1996 joined the Houston Astros organization, and in 1998 won his second championship as a manager the New Orleans Zephyrs of the Pacific Coast League in 1998. From 1999-2004, he coached with the Houston Astros major league team. In 2005 and 2007, John managed in the Milwaukee Brewers minor league system, and in 2006 managed the Durham Bulls AAA team of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays organization. John continued managing in the minor leagues for the Seattle Mariners organization from 2009-2010 before being named as the Latin America Field Coordinator for the Mariners after the 2010 season.

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Coach John Tamargo Sr dives into the art of the catching position with how you should set up in relation to the batter to make sure you are giving your pitcher the best chance to get strikes. Placing your body in the right postion can convince the umpire that the borderline pitch he just saw was in fact a strike.[MUSIC - "TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME"] Two positions in baseball where you could practice on every pitch is a pitcher and a catcher. My name is John Tamargo, InsideBaseball.com, and I'm here to show you-- we're going to work on positioning and also sign giving with Devin here. And we're going to get right at it. First of all, we want to try to be able to get ourselves in a position where a pitcher can get the most out of his strike zone. What we don't want to try to do is be too far back, or too far forward. What we want to try to do is get ourselves a safe distance from the hitter, where we can actually be closer, so we can get breaking balls over the plate for strikes, and also receive, and have the umpire more comfortable. So what we want to try to do is get ourselves in a position-- if the hitter's here, we want to try to get ourselves where the glove is out, almost touching us. And if we get to that position right there, now we know that we are going to be OK as far as a hit or swing. What we want to try to do, too, is also if you have someone that has a big back swing, we want to be careful with that. If he's back here, we want to try to move back. This is all adjustments that you can make as a catcher to get yourself in a position to be able to get your pitcher as many strikes as you can. So what I'm saying is if you're here, and he's swinging forward, we want to try to be right here as far as a right-handed hitter. Now we're going to the left hand side, which is a little bit different. We are also going to do the same thing. The only thing we're going to try to do at this point is we're going to take off our glove, and we're going to grab it on the bottom here. And we're just going to try to get ourselves so where we're almost in position where we can contact that back knee. So what we want to try to do, again, is get ourselves in position where we can get pitchers' strikes, and the umpire is in a comfortable position. So again, if we're swinging, if you're in this position here you have no fear of being hit by the bat. And that's one of the big things in baseball, is that a catcher's always got that fear of being hit with a bat. Also, we want to talk about being interference wise where we stick our glove out there. If we're too close, now we have a chance to start with a interference call here. All right, so that's one of the things. And also with this, too, is you don't want to get close enough where if you have a backswing you get hit back in the helmet, and stuff like that. So basically what we want to try to do is get ourselves a position where we can get pitchers strikes. And the reason we want to get pitchers strikes is because they're out there laboring. So let me just show you. If we're in the position where we're at right now, we can go out and if we have our target, and he throws a breaking ball and he catches it here, now we've got a strike as far as the umpire is concerned. We always want to try to give the umpire a great view of the strike zone. If we sit too far back and he catches that ball, now we're looking at a ball. So what you always want to try to do is get yourself in a position where you can help your pitcher to get a strike as many times as he can. And this is basically where we want to be when we are set up to catch a baseball. And that's what we're going to do right now, is we're going to go into signs. And signs are very important, because we have so many people that steal signs nowadays. And what we want to try to do is get ourselves in position to not be able to reveal signs to the first base coach, third base coach. What we want to try to do is get our knees pointed straight ahead, elbow against your body, with your hand tucked in here. Here is what we do with this glove. What we want to try to do is hide the signs from the third base coach. Now, this is basically how we're going to give a sign. What we want to try to do, especially with runners at second base, is we want to try to differentiate what we do. Usually a fastball one, curveball two, slider three, changeup is the wiggle. What we want to try to do is change those with runners at second base. And what we used to do is we used to use a second sign, first sign after fastball. The basic thing is at the level that we're at right now, I would say second sign with a runner at second base is your best option. So if we stick a one, two, one down, with a second sign, that means a curveball is coming. if we stick two, one, two down, that means that a fastball is coming. What you want to try to do is deke the runner at second base, so he cannot relay signs to the hitter at the plate. Now that's basically what we want to try to do. There is a lot of variations between what signs you want to use. You can use two five fastball, you can use a bunch of things. But I suggest at the early stages is that we get ourselves in position to get ourselves a sign, second sign. Now if you notice, he's got his elbow against his body, here. What we want to do with that, if we start getting in a position where we're throwing a one down, and then a two down, and our elbow comes out, now that can be relayed to the hitter. What we want to try to do is always keep ourselves in a position to where we always have the same set up, the same sign sequence, so that we will not give anything away to the opposing players and give them an advantage at the plate. And I think you've got the ideas about sign and positioning, so let's get back to the next segment of our catching instruction.

Coach John Tamargo Sr dives into the art of the catcher set up position in relation to the batter to make sure you are giving your pitcher the best chance to get strikes. Placing your body in the right position can convince the umpire that the borderline pitch he just saw was in fact a strike.

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